Xi Jinping destroys party stability to secure a fourth term

By Tom Beckwith · Reporting from Washington · October 30, 2026

By purging record numbers of officials and gutting the military, Xi Jinping has traded institutional competence for personal loyalty, leaving China fragile ahead of the 21st Party Congress.

Xi Jinping is confusing obedience with stability. By expelling a record 33 members from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the fifth plenum, he has not cleaned the house; he has gutted the foundation. The goal is a fourth term in 2027, but the cost is the professional capacity of the state. Xi believes that a party of echoes is a strong party. In reality, he is creating a brittle structure that cannot survive a crisis, only a command. He is wrong to believe that absolute loyalty is a substitute for institutional competence.

The war on unwritten rules

The fifth plenum was less a policy meeting and more a census of the terrified. According to The Guardian, 279 full and alternate members of the CCP’s Central Committee attended. This is a stark drop from the 376 members originally named in 2022.

The South China Morning Post reports the plenum adopted a decision on "Full and Rigorous Party Self-Governance." This document targets "unwritten rules" that allegedly enable corruption. Xi wrote in Qiushi that when these rules prevail, formal rules become "mere decorations." He claims these informal networks allow "political brokers and fraudsters" to advance.

The party’s advocate would argue this is a necessary surgical strike. They would say the party must "uproot sick trees" to ensure officials "dare not, cannot and do not want to" engage in corruption. They would point to the 680,000 people disciplined in the first nine months of 2026 as evidence of a healthy, self-correcting system.

This is a fantasy. This is not a war on graft; it is a war on independent thought. The Purge of Zhou Yongkang signaled that no one was too senior to fall. Now, the target is the very concept of elite consensus. When you treat "unwritten rules"—the informal norms that allow a bureaucracy to actually function—as crimes, you ensure that no official will take a risk. You get a government of clerks who wait for a signal from the top before they breathe.

A military of two

The most dangerous miscalculation is happening in the barracks. The Central Military Commission, the ruling body of the People’s Liberation Army, has been reduced from seven members to just two: Xi Jinping and Zhang Shengmin. Zhang Shengmin is the military’s anti-graft tsar and the only military member now in the Politburo.

The purge of the top brass is a category of its own. The BBC reports the expulsion of former general Zhang Youxia. Zhang Youxia was the former second-in-command in the military hierarchy. This is not a cleanup; it is a decapitation. The Asia Society Policy Institute notes that this raises serious questions about combat readiness. He has replaced experienced strategists with a single "tsar" of discipline.

The interest here is simple: Xi fears a military that might hesitate during a crisis or a general who might think for himself. He has solved this by removing everyone who could possibly disagree. But a military that only knows how to say "yes" is a military that cannot adapt in the field. He has traded the capability of the People's Liberation Army for the comfort of his own ego.

The Soviet shadow

This is not a new playbook. The mechanism here is the Yezhovshchina. In the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1939, Joseph Stalin launched a systematic removal of party elites and military leadership to ensure absolute personal loyalty before a critical transition. Stalin did not purge because the party was corrupt; he purged because he wanted to be the only source of power.

Xi is following the same path. He is removing the "two-faced people" and the "sick trees" to ensure that by the 21st Party Congress in 2027, there is no one left to offer an alternative. This is the institutionalization of Xi Jinping Thought, where the leader's vision is the only permissible reality.

The cost of this move will be felt in five years. The pool of talent dries up. Fear becomes the primary motivator. This creates a vacuum of expertise. The professionals in the room are being replaced by loyalists who boast technocratic backgrounds but lack the courage to tell the leader he is wrong.

The vacuum at the top

Xi is 73 years old. He is engineering a fourth term, but he is doing so by destroying the very apparatus that would sustain his legacy. He has reduced the party to a cult of personality and the military to a personal guard.

The dossier suggests two paths forward. First, Xi will likely fill the vacant seats of the Central Military Commission with hand-picked loyalists who have no independent power base. This will complete the subordination of the army. Second, he will likely make the anti-corruption apparatus a permanent organ of state governance. This turns the purge from a campaign into a feature of the system.

The result will be a state that is perfectly obedient and completely fragile. By removing the "unwritten rules," Xi has removed the shock absorbers of the Chinese state. He has created a system where the only way to survive is to be a mirror.

The historical pattern predicts that such concentrations of power pave the way for a serious power vacuum. When the leader eventually slows down, there will be no one left with the experience or the authority to lead. Xi has spent fourteen years turning the blade inward. He has finally succeeded in cutting away everything but himself. He may find that it is indeed lonely at the top, but the real danger is that he will be the only one left who thinks the system is still working.

Xi Jinping destroys party stability to secure a fourth term

The war on unwritten rules

A military of two

The Soviet shadow

The vacuum at the top

Sources